You can take a look at all the missing person search reports on the SBCS page here:
Search Results for “Missing Person” – San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department
The short answer is lack of resources. San Bernardino County is bigger than Switzerland.
It's really hot and LE would be risking the lives of
volunteers who make up the dog and SAR teams. Those people are not paid. LE takes this very, very seriously. After 9 days, they know it's a body recovery mission and that drops in priority, not just in San Bernardino, but everywhere. Grand Canyon still has missing people in it, so does Yosemite (something like 20?) and there will be no further searches.
In short, LE does not like risking the lives of the living to find the dead.
At this point, it's all about people who use the area for recreation. Barbara could not have wandered 20 miles from the road or any trail. Still, it's a big area and it may be a long time before she's found.
People who use that area for ATV or archery or boomerangs or drone practice are the ones who will find Barbara now. It's not the kind of area where people with metal detectors usually go (I have several friends who are super into that) because it's not near any major mining areas. There's the Desert Studies Center just down the road and they do many things that take them all over that area (to count animals, plants, etc). When winter comes, the plant life shrivels up quite a bit, making it easier to find things hidden in foliage.
What I'd really like to see are cadaver dogs out there. I am not sure how that works in San Bernardino. I'd also like to see the various missing person databases have better information, because if a person is learning to use a drone for a search, it would be very cool if they had a real reason to search.
Drone use for searches (and learning how to do it) is just now becoming a thing. It's really hard to organize since while colleges want to teach it (in geography and anthropology departments anyway), we can't due to FAA regulations. We have to be X number of miles from any airport and that's tough for most urban colleges. We also have to hire an instructor who has some kind of clearance from the FAA to teach it.
So once again, this is all volunteers who do drone searches. Who practice in various places - some of them in the Mojave, but probably not this time of year.
People who go into wilderness places expecting that there will be ongoing/forever searches for them or their loved one's bodies simply are not familiar with the reality of wilderness searches. Searches now go on longer than they used to, but 9 days is pretty much a record for a desert search in the Mojave (9.5 days). People used to be presumed dead after 3 days without water out there, then it went to 4. It would be an extraordinary and medically notable event if someone survived more than 4 days at 105F temps in the Mojave with no water (a really fat person who had more water stored in their body cells would probably claim that record).
